Your First Search

This tutorial walks you through a complete search session — from typing a query to reading cited results and asking a follow-up.

Prerequisites

• Rabbit Hole running locally (pnpm dev)
• SearXNG reachable at SEARXNG_ENDPOINT (e.g. http://ava:8888)

Step 1 — Open the search page

Navigate to http://localhost:3399. You'll see a minimal search input.

Step 2 — Type a query

Type any factual question or topic. Examples:

• React Server Components performance tradeoffs
• What is GraphRAG and how does it differ from RAG?
• Rust async runtime internals

Press Enter or click the search button.

Step 3 — Watch the agent work

The search agent runs up to 7 tool-call steps. You'll see tool calls stream in before the answer:

• searchWeb (general) — broad web results from Google, Brave, DuckDuckGo
• searchWikipedia — foundational context if the topic is well-documented
• searchWeb (it or social media) — GitHub, Stack Overflow, or Reddit for depth

The agent decides which tools to call and in what order based on the query.

Step 4 — Read the cited answer

The answer renders with inline citation badges like [1] [2]. Hover any badge to see the source title, domain, and snippet. Click to open the source.

A Sources panel on the right lists all sources the agent consulted, numbered to match the inline citations.

Step 5 — Ask a follow-up

The search input stays active. Type a follow-up question — it has full context from the previous answer. The agent will search again if needed.

Step 6 — Try a category-specific query

For community discussions, try:

what do developers think about Bun vs Node.js performance

The agent will recognize this as a community-sentiment query and search social media (Reddit, Hacker News) in addition to general web results.

For code/tooling queries:

best pnpm workspace monorepo patterns GitHub

The agent will target the it category (GitHub, Stack Overflow) for code-level results.

What's next

• Run your first deep research for a comprehensive report on any topic
• Search with categories to understand category routing